AthenaHQ

The Solution & Approach

AthenaHQ splits its product into see and act. See is the measurement half: a visibility dashboard across eight AI platforms, QVEM for estimating prompt volume where no keyword-volume data exists, and a catalog of more than three million real-world AI responses. Act is what the company built out through 2026: Oracle finds and fixes incorrect claims models make about a brand, the Athena Citation Engine scores a draft's citation likelihood before it publishes, and Ask Athena, the agentic copilot that replaced the dashboard as the primary surface in June 2026.

The company competes on published data rather than on capital. It has raised about $2.7M, roughly a fiftieth of the category leader, and answers that with proprietary research: the State of AI Search 2026 benchmark, QVEM, and an empirical ACE validation against 1,761 articles that reported an r=0.90 correlation between citation score and actual citation rate. That study is the one AthenaHQ figure that shows its sample and method. Most other performance numbers on this page, including the 23x citation lift and the 52.6% share of voice, originate in the company's own marketing.

The category POV it pushes hardest is that AI search is a leveler. Founder Andrew Yan's framing, built around a scar-treatment brand outranking far larger competitors, is that you do not need the deepest content library to win a citation. He has also argued that LinkedIn now carries domain authority rivaling top-tier media for LLM citation purposes, and has floated a fourth acronym, ASO for Agentic Search Optimization.

Best for

Mid-market and growth teams that want AEO/GEO measurement plus remediation tooling at a self-serve price point, rather than an enterprise suite.

Pricing & trial

Public self-serve pricing starts at $95 per month billed annually or $295 monthly, both with 3,600 credits, eight LLMs, and unlimited seats, with an Enterprise tier priced on request that adds API access, ACE, SSO, and a dedicated GEO specialist. No free trial is advertised, though the first month is discounted 67%. athenahq.ai/pricing. Pricing.

Agent Experience

How you build on this platform (or wire it into your own agents):

AthenaHQ shipped an OAuth-scoped MCP server in March 2026 and publishes an API reference and an llms.txt, so it is buildable on, though API access sits behind the Enterprise tier.

Reference customers

Coinbase, SoFi, Slalom, Hearst, HexClad, Grüns, PagerDuty, Checkr, Rootly, Lago, AutoRFP, Nuvadermis, Coupons.com, Artisan, Ollie.

Case studies & customer stories

• Nuvadermis 5x'd its citation rate and tripled AI search share of voice source
• AutoRFP attributes 22.4% of inbound leads to ChatGPT, 10x traffic lift source
• Grüns grew AI SEO citations 23x in two months source
• Rootly reached 52.6% AI search share of voice source
• Lago drove a 50% increase in demos from AI search, 3% to 33% AI Overview impressions in six months source

Recent moves

• 2026-09-18Founder Andrew Yan described AthenaHQ as serving "300+ brands like Coinbase, SoFi, and Gruns," the first public customer count since the 70+ figure at the June 2025 stealth exit. source
• 2026-06-17Launched Athena AI, an agentic copilot that queries eight or more AI platforms and replaces the dashboard as the primary surface. source
• 2026-05-28Published an empirical validation of the Athena Citation Engine against 1,761 articles: top-decile content was cited 87% of the time versus 38.6% for bottom-decile, with score and citation rate correlating at r=0.90. source
• 2026-05-08Published the Nuvadermis case study under a "Mr Worldwide SEO" framing, arguing AI search lets smaller brands outrank deeper-pocketed competitors. source
• 2026-05-04Launched Oracle, which finds and actions incorrect claims AI models make about a product. A demo run on Canva surfaced 87 contradictions in one week. source
• 2026-04-22Published tracked data arguing LinkedIn now carries domain authority rivaling top-tier media outlets for LLM citation frequency. source

Company, Financials & Funding History

Founded 2024 in San Francisco and accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch after two prior rejections, with Andrew Yan as founder and public face. The company launched from stealth in June 2025 with 70+ customers and about three million cataloged AI responses, and now runs at roughly 19 employees.

Analyst placement

Independent analyst Duane Forrester ranked AthenaHQ the #1 AI search tool in April 2026, placing it top right on both his Coverage and Confidence scores. source. No G2, Gartner, or CB Insights placement on record.